Conference Agenda

The paper estimates the impact of freedom of association and collection bargaining (FACB) rights for workers and democracy on goods exports at the aggregate level and broken down by 17 industries in a bilateral gravity trade model for the years 2000-2017 for a large sample (161 exporting and 209 importing) of countries. The paper uses the Freedom House democracy indicators along with new indicators of FACB rights (Kucera and Sari, 2019) defined according to ILO “fundamental” Conventions 87 and 98, based on the coding of nine publicly available textual sources (including six sources produced by the International Labour Organization and national legislation), and distinguishing between FACB rights in law and in practice. In baseline Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) regressions driven by cross-sectional variation, the paper finds that stronger FACB rights and democracy are associated lower goods exports at the aggregate level. These results are broadly similar for FACB rights in law and in practice and civil liberties and political rights aspects of democracy. These results are sample-sensitive, however, and are overturned with a truncated sample excluding observations with the largest trade values, a difference that is not attributable to the impact of the largest exporting countries. At the industry level, we find that stronger FACB rights and democracy are associated lower exports of such labor-intensive, price-sensitive goods as textiles, apparel and footwear, but also with lower exports of several more capital-intensive industries, in both full and truncated samples. The paper considers several policy options that might be able to overcome such “race to the bottom” scenarios.

It has become a truism that information technology has facilitated transformations in work—what work is done, who does it, where and how it is done; how it is organized, valued, and remunerated; the nature of the workplace; and the relationships between workers and managers. Examples are well-documented in the literature, for example on increasingly complex global value chains; the growth of remote work and algorithmic management; the ‘fissuring’ of workplaces and outsourcing of ‘non-core’ tasks; and the emergence of platform work.

Less exhaustively documented, however, is how information technology facilitates new worker organizing strategies. Existing literature focuses on four main topics in this area: unions using information technology; informal organizing via social media; platform worker organizing; and, recently, the emergence of ‘worker data science.’ These phenomena are in relatively early stages of development, and have received less investment and policy support than the technological innovations being used by managers to transform work. Specifically, there is relatively little research on how workers use specific kinds of information technology to enact specific strategies to build power.

This paper helps fill this gap. It draws on qualitative fieldwork in the United Kingdom to document and classify organizing strategies facilitated by information technology. The paper documents ten cases that fall into five categories or ‘patterns’: (1) informal social media groups become job boards; (2) workers share information via spreadsheets; (3) informal groups formalize; (4) unions cooperate with informal networks without controlling them; and (5) for-profit companies support worker power. The paper documents each pattern with two cases and shows how the use of specific information technologies facilitates specific power-building strategies.

For example, when ‘informal social media groups become job boards,’ workers running the groups often set policies such as wage floors, effectively serving the market function—and reproducing the power structures—of union hiring halls. When ‘workers share information via spreadsheets,’ workers use information technology to aggregate and analyze data from specific labor markets (e.g., publishing), surfacing abusive employers and patterns such as gender pay gaps.

By enabling new strategies and empowering new actors (e.g., informal worker groups), information technology creates new opportunities for building worker power. However, it also creates new challenges and risks for workers and their organizations, such as content moderation and information security.

In addition to presenting the empirical cases and analytical categories (patterns), the paper lists lessons (opportunities, challenges, and risks) for workers, organizations, and policymakers, and questions for future research.

In 2020, Indonesian government introduce labour law reform which sparks protest from majority of workers due to deregulation nature of the new law. The government wants to push investment climate by making Indonesian labour law less strict: easier lay off, more flexible temporary working contract, and more liberty to use outsourcing working arrangement. Unfortunately, the unionisation rate in Indonesia is still low despite rising precarity in the labour market.

Much research shows that majority of workers in Indonesia is having a hard time believing in union due to several factors; such as the politics of big union and advocacy issues that is not relatable with ‘millennial’ workers. Interestingly, in the past few years, independent trade union began to emerge. They are detaching themselves from the ‘traditional’, major trade union. They are declaring themselves as “unions outside the company”, which gives more opportunity for workers in the non-standard relationship such as freelancer and informal workers to join the union. This independent union also use social media to invite people to join, as well as making discussion and informing its reading about labour issues in Indonesia.

This study aims to discuss the opportunity and challenges of Indonesia’s independent union in the fight of mainstreaming trade unions and fight for workers’ right in Indonesia. The research is conducted through in-depth interview towards three independent union in Indonesia that have strong social media persona: SINDIKASI, SEMESTA, and SRAYA.

The paper argues that grassroots organising, protest and campaign through social media, is the way forward for trade union. The union needs to stay relevant with the younger generations so that it can build class solidarity from below and push to ensure decent work for all.